Writing in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Ilya Somin of George Mason University provides an update on the legal challenges to the mandatory insurance component of ObamaCare (HR 3590).  Excerpts:

Florida federal District Court Judge Roger Vinson wrote that the government’s claim that the mandate is clearly authorized by existing Supreme Court precedent is “not even a close call.” He points out that “[t]he power that the individual mandate seeks to harness is simply without prior precedent,” because no previous Supreme Court decision ever authorized Congress to force ordinary citizens to buy products they did not want. …

The federal government claims that Congress has the power to impose the mandate under the Commerce Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and the Tax Clause of the Constitution. … He outright rejected the government’s claim that the mandate is constitutional because it is a “tax.” It is instead a financial penalty for refusing to comply with a federal regulation. As Judge Vinson pointed out, congressional leaders consistently emphasized before the law’s enactment that it was not a tax.

In September 2009, President Obama himself noted that “for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase.” He was right. …

Virtually all purchases of health insurance are intrastate because a combination of state and federal law makes it illegal to purchase health insurance across state lines. Moreover, the object of the mandate isn’t even commerce at all. Instead of regulating pre-existing commerce, the bill forces people to engage in commercial transactions they would have otherwise avoided. …

The anti-mandate plaintiffs still face an uphill struggle. Courts are rarely willing to strike down a law that is a centerpiece of the political agenda of the president and his party. Nonetheless, it is increasingly clear that lawsuits are far from “frivolous” and have a real chance to prevail.

Read the whole article: Mandate Challenge Could Prevail.